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Home Made Raspberry Pi Standing Desk Controller
- tomahony 6y agoI mentioned this in a HN post in the past regarding standing desks, mentioning that I'd created an over-engineered standing desk controller (using a Raspberry Pi) over lockdown as as little fun project. Somebody asked about a write-up for it, so here it is
- watersb 6y agoThanks for this! I have yet to actually build anything that controls hardware, but I have been lurking, reading about microcontrollers, collecting little bits. An actual application, a solution to a real problem or neat project, is the best way to make it real.
- grogenaut 6y agoIf you have some disposable income buy an Arduino kit from say elegoo. They come with a lot of little labs, basically 30 min - 1 hour exercises where you take one of the 30 physical devices it comes with and use it.a little bit of Lego like assembling of parts and copying some code from GitHub. So like a led (light) is one lab. The next might be a photo sensor (signal with amount of light). After these two labs you can now make a night light. Or a rave strobe. Do the switch or button lab and you can turn it on or off or change the pattern. After 30 labs you have a pretty good idea of what to do. Now buy an esp32 that works with a breadboard and if you know basic http you now have an iot device. I recently hooked an esp32 to a dht22 and started graphing temp in my gourmet mushroom enclosure in about an hour of watching baseball. Just sends data to influx and grafana on an rpi data hub
- zaxomi 6y agoNice project. Do you have an emergency stop button?
- p_l 6y agoAsking the important things here ! :D Also, what positive safety control loop could a standing desk use?
- solarkraft 6y agoYou say it's over-engineered, but every time I read it I think of something Mr. AvE said about the topic (albeit with physical materials, regarding Juicero, to be precise): If it uses more material than required for the job it's over-built and under-engineered. Your solution seems to be massively that.
- IshKebab 6y agoClever use of an ultrasonic distance sensor. I think one of those cheap time of flight proximity sensors would work too.
- e28eta 6y agoI love the idea of accidentally leaving a shoe (or whatever) underneath the height sensor and being confused about why the desk moves to the wrong height... Clever though!
- daniellarusso 6y agoI was thinking about a sleeping pet.
- pugworthy 6y agoEven better would be a cat walking by and causing the whole thing to raise up suddenly :)
- tomahony 6y agoHaha, this has happened a few times. Especially if I move the chair that I've been sitting on out of the way toward the sensor.
- mdorazio 6y agoI have to ask this most of the time I see an r-pi project: why r-pi instead of ESP8266 for something this simple?
- karlshea 6y agoI’ve never heard of the ESP8266, but I have heard of (and used, for several projects) the RPi. That’s probably the reason for a lot of people.
- entropie 6y agoIf you want to do things that need an OS use RPI, if you want read/transfer sensor data or control basic servos esp8266 is a joy to work with. There are plenty of others, arduino is maybe more known as buzzword for microcontrollers.
- scsilver 6y agoYou need a computer and the right cords to program a controller, the pi is that computer as well as the controller.
- rhinoceraptor 6y agoYes, but you also get the downsides of having a full computer. Namely, it has an OS, it has an SD card that can wear out, it takes longer to boot, etc.
- martin_a 6y agoYes! Replace the ESP8266 with some Arduino clone for 3.50 € and you'll even be more beginner friendly...
- sokoloff 6y agoMakes it harder to make it work with Homebridge/Alexa though.
- pugworthy 6y agoFirst, that is really neat - thanks for sharing. The fragility of that installation makes me nervous though. Pretty easy to bump it with a knee or catch something on it and pull some wires out! But you've got some great documentation via the article.
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoI’m curious why someone might reach for an RPI for a project like this? The last Pi I was using was consuming something like 8 watts while idle. That’s like $1.50 a month in electricity here in the Bay Area... Many times, an arduino or esp32 would be more than capable with considerably less power usage.
- gjs278 6y agooh my god not an entire $1.50
- tomahony 6y agoInteresting point, I hadn't actually considered what the power consumption of RPis is. I use a few around the house to do various things. Honestly though, the only reason I've used one here is that it was lying around unused. As you mentioned, if I were buying something myself I'd use a different, smaller controller.
- buescher 6y agoBecause sometimes you just need the equivalent of an early Cray to do the job of a few relays...
- xellisx 6y agoSeveral years back I was looking for an adjustable desk and was not liking the prices. I ended up buying this: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Husky-62-in-Adjustable-Height-Work-Bench-Table-HOLT62XDB12/301810799 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Husky-62-in-Adjustable-Height-Wo...
- BostonEnginerd 6y agoI also bought this desk - works great!!
- xellisx 6y agoYeah - I totally don't use it for standing. I get to engrossed with what I'm doing and I forget to to stand. But it hold my 4 monitors, laptop and mic stand just fine.
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